Robert Burnham, Jr., is a household word among astronomers. We know his work through his three-volume “Burnham Celestial Handbook.” The handbook is to astronomers what the “Kelly Blue Book” is to car dealers.

On the evening of Oct. 18, 1957, eager to use his homemade 10-inch reflector telescope, the 26-year-old propped it up against the porch railings of his parents’ Prescott, Ariz., home. At 10:30 p.m., he saw a smudge that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was his first comet discovery known today as Comet Burnham 1958a.

Soon after this discovery, he was visited by the late Sen. Barry Goldwater. The senator surprised Burnham, offering him an 1882 brass refracting telescope owned by his late uncle, Morris Goldwater, who had once been Prescott’s mayor. Word spread throughout Arizona in various newspapers and attracted the attention of Henry Giclas, director of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. If Burnham had the patience to look for comets, thought Giclas, he would be well-qualified for a mundane and boring job called a “proper motion” study. In February 1958, Giclas offered Burnham a $6,000-a-year job at Lowell that would likely only last two years.

This was not the first time Lowell had hired a skilled amateur for cheap repetitive work. In 1929, Lowell hired a young Kansas farmer by the name of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. During the post-Pluto years, Tombaugh was relegated to taking long-exposure photographs of the sky.

Burnham was hired to perform monotonous and repetitive work on a comparator, or “blinker” machine, that was below the dignity of professional astronomers. Burnham would spend all night taking photographs of the same areas that Tombaugh had taken 25 years earlier. Then he would insert both the glass photographic plates in the blinker. By rapidly switching plates, he could see that some stars had moved. This was called the proper motion study. It was boring and repetitive work, but perfect for Burnham. He got to spend a lot of time behind the Clark 13-inch refractor and this allowed him a lot of time toward the continued writing of his astronomical journal that he had started in high school.

By 1966, Burnham had amassed enough astronomical data to fill eight notebooks. His employment at Lowell gave him unfettered access to Lowell’s library, with mountains of information and photographs. With this information, this amateur astronomer could include more scientific depth in his handbook. He couldn’t find anyone, including Giclas, to publish it, so with help from his family, he self-published his now famous “Burnham’s Celestial Handbook.”

After several years of self-publishing, in 1976, Burnham secured a deal with Dover Publications and the three-volume “Celestial Handbook” became widely available to amateur and professional astronomers around the world. It was written in several languages and is still published and sold to this day in any bookstore.

Three years later, funding for the proper motion study dried up and without a formal education, after 21 years of hard work, Burnham was fired. Poor royalties for his book and the firing at Lowell were devastating. Even though he was offered an astronomy teaching position at a high school in Texas, he vanished. Not even his family knew his whereabouts. It wasn’t until 1997 that Tony Ortega, an amateur astronomer and writer for the Phoenix New Times, uncovered the mystery of Robert Burnham, Jr.

Burnham had become a recluse in San Diego. He painted cats in Balboa Park, living in homeless shelters. He was seen in Balboa Park at night, but no one recognized this stranger who would spout incredible knowledge of the stars.

Robert Burnham, Jr., an Air Force veteran, was buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery in 1993. Like many people of genius, this astronomy giant spent his last years alone and destitute. As a final note, in 2009 a memorial bronze plaque resembling a page in Burnham’s “Celestial Handbook” was installed on the Pluto Walk at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.

— Bill Logan is an expert solar observer and volunteer amateur astronomer with the University of Oregon’s Pine Mountain Observatory. He lives in Bend. Contact: blogan0821@gmail.com